Election 2024: Immigration — Tackling misinformation and housing will quell much discontent
At Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow, violence erupted in April over plans to accommodate international protection applicants there. File picture: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie
As fires burned across Ireland at accommodation destined, or merely rumoured, to house refugees in violent protests, far-right rallies were also mushrooming up in towns and cities internationally.
A similar poison to anti-semitic narratives in 1930s Germany were re-infecting western nations — from Ireland to the UK to Poland to France to the US.
Efforts were being made online and in Ireland to create fear about migrants and anger that they were draining resources. These misinformed and oversimplified messages are designed to manipulate the discontented many, giving them an easy scapegoat for any woes.
Increasingly racist rhetoric from the time of Donald Trump’s first presidency has slowly emboldened anti-migrant actors.
Coming at a time of economic struggle, with the covid pandemic and then the war in Ukraine triggering shortages in fuel and food and stoking inflation, the ground was ripe for right-wing and neo-fascist manipulation.
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In Ireland, years of under-investment in housing and public services clashed with a sudden increase in people coming to Ireland. And anti-immigrant and neo-fascist rhetoric began to be whipped up by a minority.
But the frustrations that minority capitalised on are very real. Average house prices are now 10.8% higher than at the height of the previous property boom in April 2007, according to CSO figures.
And a recent Daft report found that rents have risen by 7.2% in the last year, bringing the average rent to €1,955 a month nationally — 43% higher than before the outbreak of covid-19.
And Ireland has seen an increase in migration. Almost 150,000 people immigrated to Ireland in the 12 months to the end of April, according to Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures — a 17-year high. These 149,200 immigrants included 30,000 returning Irish citizens.
The CSO also found that more than 69,000 people left the State in those 12 months, the highest emigration figure since 2015 — and almost half the number immigrating into Ireland.
And Ireland needs more workers. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has been warning for years that Ireland needs inward migration to have enough people to build the homes and update the infrastructure we so desperately need.
Political paradigms have shifted over recent decades, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Populist far-right parties are now among the top three most powerful political forces in a third of European countries.
Anti-Islam, far-right Geert Wilders — once considered very fringe — is now a dominant figure in Holland’s coalition government after his party secured 23.6% of the vote in 2023.
Viktor Orban in Hungary has long been an anti-immigrant, immoderate political voice in Europe and Georgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister is from the far-right Brothers of Italy party linked to former dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascists.
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) came first in the 2024 parliamentary elections, winning 28.9% of the vote in September. But it needed at least one coalition partner to form a government and those talks were ongoing at the time of this publication.
And in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN – Rassemblement National) has been steadily expanding her support base as she moves ever closer to the Elysee Palace, achieving victories in both the national and the European Parliament elections and growing RN to become the country’s largest party. Even Germany has seen a rise in the far-right.
But in Ireland much of the fear and hate was being stoked online by foreign actors — along with a handful of home-grown agitators.
At Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow, violence erupted in April over plans to accommodate international protection applicants there. Fires were lit and protestors clashed with gardaí resulting in multiple arrests.
But approximately 80% of online posts relating to the protests at Newtownmountkennedy at the time were from social media users based outside Ireland, according to analysis by Sky News.
International social media users — mostly in the US and UK — used anti-immigration hashtags #IrelandBelongsToTheIrish and #IrelandIsFull at the time far more frequently than any Irish-based user, according to Sky News analysis.
Irish anti-immigration agitators have also been collaborating with international terrorist organisations and prominent neo-Nazis. These transnational movements may be funnelling increasing money to Ireland's far-right.
More media regulation is needed to stamp out hate online and stop social media’s ability to amplify that hate via algorithms which suggest and push harmful content with impunity.
Ireland has introduced the Online Safety Code which will sanction companies that promote hate online with penalties of up to €20m or 10% of turnover — whichever is higher. But it remains to be seen whether the new code and the new agency, Coimisiún na Meán, will have the teeth and resources to hold these giant multinationals to proper account.
Communities concerned about a lack of resources in their area must of course be listened to when they express fears about a town’s only hotel being used to accommodate refugees or a large accommodation centre coming to their area.
But the lies spouted by racist agitators must be robustly challenged and quashed.
Public information campaigns calling out widespread misinformation and more media education in schools may be necessary to adequately challenge it, especially as the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) makes the online world more complex and convincing.
A new, properly staffed agency with responsibility for asylum applications, accommodation and integration should also be established, with a senior minister appointed to this area alone to oversee it and to fix the system.
More State-owned sites need to be urgently developed for accommodation while former institutional buildings, which could be quickly redeveloped into refugee or homeless accommodation, should be purchased and brought on-stream to avoid reliance on the private sector and have more accommodation on the State’s books.
And ultimately, tackling the general housing crisis and boosting public services will quell much of the discontent over migration. When people are happy and feel they live in a fair society, they don’t need to find someone convenient to blame.
